Woman-to-Woman Mentoring May Keep Women From Dropping Out of STEM Subjects, Study Says

There are plenty of reasons that women don't end up in science, tech, and engineering: They don't feel like they belong (usually because society and pop culture have told them so for years), they feel isolated, they sometimes have to deal with sexual harassment. A lot of these issues come to a head around college—the moment when women drop out of STEM subjects at higher rates than their male peers.

The good news is that a new study found that having a mentor early in college can prevent female engineering students from dropping out of school. But there's a catch: The mentor has to be a woman.

To conduct the study, two researchers at the University of Massachusetts recruited 150 female college freshmen who were majoring in engineering—they chose engineering because it stands out for lacking women, even among STEM subjects—as well as advanced engineering students to serve as their mentors. Some of the women were assigned female mentors, others got male mentors, and one group served as the control with no mentorship at all. The students with mentors met with them once a month.

At the end of their freshman year, 18 percent of the students who were assigned male mentors had dropped out of school or switched majors. Eleven percent of the students who got no mentoring at all had dropped out of made the switch.

And how many students assigned female mentors had bailed on engineering?

None.

Yep, that's right, at the end of the year, every single woman who had been meeting up with another woman in engineering every month was sticking with engineering. That's a 100 percent success rate. And those results endured over two years, even after the mentoring had ended.

How did it work? The authors of the study wrote that the female mentors "promoted aspirations to pursue engineering careers by protecting women’s belonging and confidence." Read: Being a woman in science can be tough sometimes. Having another woman around—especially one who's more experienced and successful than you are so far—to talk about those issues and show you that it can all turn out all right can be hugely motivational.

While the sample size of this study may have been small, it points to broader learnings about women's ability to mentor each other. If woman-to-woman mentorship works this well for freshman engineering students, why not use it for students in other subjects? What about students in high school or middle school? This research suggests that if it's applied at the right time, it could be transformational.